“Let’s go, then,” Marcus said quietly. “We need to get Ianira to safety and have Doctor Mindel look at her.”
It was a silent and tense group that set out through the maze of sewer tunnels beneath the East End’s filthy streets, searching for a way out.
Chapter Eleven
John Lachley carried Dominica Nosette’s hacked up torso a long way through the sewer tunnels. The bundle he’d slung over one shoulder was heavy and he paused frequently to shift it, but Lachley never considered simply dumping it and turning back. He wanted to leave her somewhere appropriate and had tumbled to just the perfect spot. When he finally reached the place, he paused, listening to the rumble of carriage traffic through a grating overhead, then smiled and turned off into a freshly-broken opening in the sewer. The vaulted space in which he found himself was destined to become part of the cellar of New Scotland Yard. The police headquarters, still under construction, was directly overhead.
Lachley smiled to himself and dumped the butchered remains of his pathetic little journalist where workmen would find her, then tipped his cloth hat. “Ta, luv.” He grinned, using the voice of his childhood. “I’m obliged, Miss Nosette, that I am.”
Then he set out the way he’d come, whistling jauntily to himself. The tunnels he followed to reach Tibor snaked and twisted in multiple directions, following gas mains and sewage flows and underground streams bricked over, odd corners and chambers formed out of the remnant cellars of sixteenth and seventeenth, even eighteenth century warehouses and wharfside pubs, all connected like gladiator tunnels beneath an ancient fighting arena. As he walked, he planned exactly what he would do when he carried Ianira to Spaldergate House.